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Monday, November 04, 2013

The U.S. government has a problem with dead people. For one thing, it pays them way too much money.

In the past few years, Social Security paid $133 million to beneficiaries who were deceased. The federal employee retirement system paid more than $400 million to retirees who had passed away. And an aid program spent $3.9 million in federal money to pay heating and air-conditioning bills for more than 11,000 of the dead.

These mistakes are part of a surprising glitch at the heart of the federal bureaucracy. Because of a jury-rigged and outdated system meant to track deaths, the government has trouble determining exactly which Americans are deceased.

As a result, Washington is bedeviled by both the living dead and the dead living.

The task of tracking deaths for the federal bureaucracy is an enormous one; about 2.5 million Americans die each year. Federal officials say the vast majority of these cases are handled correctly: The death is recorded. Government money is no longer sent to that person.

But not always. In fact, glitches in the system have paid more than $700 million to the dead, according to government audits performed since 2008.

The trouble with dead people often begins with something called the Death Master File, which is kept by the Social Security Administration. Every day new reports are added, provided by relatives, funeral homes and the state agencies that issue official death certificates.

Now, after years of inattention, President Obama and two senators have laid out ideas to improve the system. In his 2014 budget, Obama requested $22 million to improve the death reports that come in from states by upgrading their systems to transmit faster and more accurate data.

In the Senate, Carper and Sen. Tom Coburn (R-Okla.) have written a bill that would require all federal agencies to check the Death Master File before paying benefits. It would also give all agencies access to the full file, not just the partial one. And it would require new efforts to make sure the data in the file are accurate.

FBMS provides the administrative backbone to support DOI’s financial transactions, acquisitions, travel, grants and subsidies, and property and fleet management functions across 60 offices. When fully deployed, it will replace and/or integrate 160 of Interior's 162 legacy business systems and subsystems, according to the agency website.

Virtustream, a provider of cloud software and services, is working with prime contractor Unisys to move the financial management system, which is based on SAP software, to its Virginia-based data center, which complies with security guidelines stipulated by the Federal Information Systems Management Act (FISMA).

SAP application hosting is the first project Interior officials and contractors are tackling as the department expedites its move to the cloud. In August, Interior awarded a set of contracts valued at up to $10 billion to 10 vendors in a bid to transform overall IT capabilities.

Interior expects to save $100 million each year from 2016 to 2020 by moving applications to the cloud.

Virtustream is SAP-certified in both cloud and hosting services. The company is currently going through the process to get security accreditation for its enterprise cloud under the federal government’s Federal Risk and Authorization Management Program, said Kevin Dattolico, chief sales officer for Virtustream.

About the FedCFO Publisher

Since 1994, Doug Davidson has delivered Information Technology consulting to both public and private sector clients. He is a United States citizen and a certified Project Management Professional (PMP) who's experience with federal administrative and financial management systems is in the areas of implementation, integration, operations and maintenance, federal accounting, reporting, budgeting, data extraction, data conversion, data transformation, and information synthesization.
Learn more at:
http://www.linkedin.com/in/dougdavidson
Contact the publisher:
wddavidsonjr@gmail.com